Marketing Professional Services

Marketing professional services is more than promotional advertising and chasing leads.

Marketing professional services is about attracting ideal clients and also generating repeat business from past and current clients.

Many factors contribute to successful professional services marketing. Here are some of the most important elements.

Your Unique Personality, Skills & Know-How

In practice, marketing professional services is essentially an extension of applying our specialized skills and resources to help others.

Each of us brings our own unique combination of personality, skills and know-how to each client project. Our individual bundle of resources distinguishes us from everyone else.

It’s also the magic ingredient that allows us to serve and satisfy clients in our own way. In providing our services, as professionals we typically start by identifying specific issues that our clients face. This means understanding their individual needs, wants and expectations.

The more we know about our clients, the more we can help and satisfy them.

Similarly, for clients to benefit from our help, they must like us well enough to trust us and believe in the effectiveness of our competence. Our clients need, want and deserve to know who we are both as individuals and as professionals.

Mass Marketing Techniques Don’t Work

Given our own distinctive approach to serving and satisfying clients, as well as the individual nature of our clients and their issues, mass marketing techniques simply won’t work. These standardized one-size-fits-all techniques are more suited to promoting commodities and consumer goods than marketing professional service.

Instead of trying to mass market our professional services, we can do what we already good at–interact with other people.

Repeat & Referral Business

Regardless of what strategies we chose, like satisfying clients, marketing professional services is based upon establishing, maintaining and enhancing relationships with people who can help us generate more repeat and referral business.

Whatever we do to establish and maintain healthy mutual beneficial relationships with this group of people, it’s all good …it helps attract ideal clients and generate more new business.

The Basics of Marketing Professional Services

Marketing professional services can appear to be a daunting challenge for anyone new to the concept, regardless of one’s professional training and experience.

But relax…it’s not nearly as difficult as may seem. The following content will help you understand the basic essentials of marketing professional services.

With this basic understanding, you can draw on other elements of marketing professional services to generate more new business.

If the concept of marketing professional services is new to you, it’s tempting to consider it fairly narrow field. Don’t be misled.

Like most other areas of interest, marketing professional services is also subject to massive information overload.

To simplify the task of managing this information, the following outline will be used to organize web content and blog posts.

Ideally, this will make it easier to find what you are looking for and how to apply it to generate more business. As a perpetual work in progress, it will be updated regularly….so heck back soon and often.

Marketing Essentials

These essentials are critical to successfully marketing professional services. They apply equally to self-employed individuals working on their own from home offices to members of professional firms occupying several floors in high-rise office towers.

The key is to customize them to reflect your unique situation.

Identifying And Serving The Right Market Niche

The right market niche matches what clients need and want with the services that you can and do offer.

Ideal clients face their own challenges or opportunities. They need professional help in addressing these issues.

You have the right stuff to help them overcome the challenges and maximize the opportunities.

Selecting the right target market is more than a good idea. It’s one of the key essentials of successfully marketing professional services.

Establishing And Maintaining Effective Marketing Relationships

Clients, network contacts, suppliers and competitors can all contribute in some way to successful marketing. The overall effectiveness of these relationships depends upon mutual respect and personal trustworthiness

Professional competence, as reflected in all marketing professional services activities, also plays a role in attracting and serving clients.

Establishing and maintaining effective marketing relationships contribute to both the content strategy and client service elements of your marketing framework.

How Market Development Generates New Business

Generally speaking, market development is about expanding the market for specific goods or services.

There are only four ways to expand the market for professional services. This means providing: i more existing services to existing clients; ii. existing services to new clients; iii. new services to existing clients and iv. new services to new clients.

Further, there are only two ways to obtain new business from each of these two sources: provide more existing services or provide new services.

Not only does market development help generate more new business for you, it also offers more services to more clients. This in turn will help increase client satisfaction, a feature of the client service component of your marketing framework.

Marketing Wisdom

Marketing wisdom represents the knowledge and information that owners of small businesses accumulate as they go about marketing their goods and services. It is also an element of marketing professional service.

In many cases this wisdom takes the form of insights and observations that arise when things work out well and also when they don’t work out so well.

The Science of Generating Repeat Business

Repeat business is the reward that businesses receive and enjoy from satisfying clients.

Consistently, the best way to serve and satisfy clients is to meet their needs and wants, while exceeding their expectations. How do you satisfy clients so much that they keep coming back for more of your service?

The most effective marketing professional services includes generating more repeat business.

Marketing Trends

Marketing trends are those series of connected, inter-related events that influence and shape the process of marketing professional services .

A single isolated event or occurrence does not constitute a trend. Nor is a series of seemingly unrelated developments necessarily a trend.

For the most part a trend happens outside of us, not usually the result of any action that we might have taken.

Developments That Enhance Business Strength

The best developments enhance business strength. They add to and build upon those things that you do well. And even better, they can also reduce the negative impact of those things that we do not do well.

Content strategy, an increasingly popular marketing trend, is ideally suited for professionals. There is no better approach for promoting and enhancing your brand.